During a March 20 hearing in Salt Lake City, U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups described as “astounding” the FBI’s claim that critical video of the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing had simply gone “missing” – an assertion that buttresses attorney Jesse Trentadue’s belief that the Bureau has spared no effort to cover up critical facts about the atrocity.

Trentadue, whose brother Kenney was murdered by federal agents in Oklahoma shortly after the 1995 terrorist attack, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for surveillance video of Timothy McVeigh parking the truck bomb outside the Murrah Federal Building, and dashcam video of his arrest by a state trooper 90 minutes after the explosion. The FBI claims that these indispensable pieces of evidence regarding what was at the time the worst terrorist act in U.S. history have simply vanished in the tenebrous depths of an official warehouse, much like the Ark of the Covenant was at the end of the first Indiana Jones film. The attorney filed his first FOIA request in December 2006, and the Bureau has done its formidable best to ignore, mislead, misdirect, and otherwise obstruct efforts to produce the records, as it is required to by law.

“The FBI has submitted several declarations from its top records manager to show the agency has searched electronic databases and evidence warehouses without success,” reports the Deseret News of Salt Lake City. “But Waddoups said the declarations lack credibility because they do not include firsthand knowledge or details about who, when, where or how the searches were conducted.”